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The Saragossa Manuscript

This three-hour swirl of Polish phantasmagoria, from 1965, is an epic piece of japery; it celebrates visions and magic by means of labyrinthine storytelling. Flashbacks within flashbacks make up the story, which is catalyzed when two soldiers on opposite sides of an unexplained nineteenth-century war stumble upon a manuscript that transfixes them with its potent, sexy language and imagery. The book recounts the picaresque adventures of Captain Alfonso van Worden, who travels between Andalusia and La Mancha during the Spanish Inquisition, encounters two gorgeous Muslim women in a boudoir at a deserted inn, and awakens beneath a gallows. The rest of his journey circles back to these euphoric yet troubling experiences, as such characters as a possessed peasant, a hermit exorcist, a cabalist, and a gypsy chief regale him with stories involving stumbling suitors, busty beauties, ridiculous duels, and mystical symbols. The director, Wojciech Has, sustains a sardonic, slaphappy tone; the elegantly modulated black-and-white cinematography, with tones ranging from bleached to silken, and the off-kilter compositions suggest that the director himself is sporting a death’s-head grin.